security or withdraw diplomatic staff in advance of a crisis from central america to khartoum, from tunisia to yemen, from egypt to mali and others. while dod does not have the primary responsibility for the security of u.s. diplomatic facilities around the world, we do work closely with the state department and support them as requested. in the months prior to the benghazi attack, as i've said, we had received from the intelligence community almost 300 reports on possible threats to american facilities around the world. over the course of the day on september 11th general dempsey and i received a number of reports of possible threats to u.s. facilities, including those in cairo, egypt, but there were no reports of imminent threats to u.s. personnel or facilities in benghazi. by our best estimate the incident at the temporary mission facility in benghazi began at about 3:42pm eastern daylight time on september 11th. the embassy in tripoli was notified of the attacks almost immediately, and within 17 minutes of the initial reports, about 3:59pm, africom directed an unarmed and unmanned surve